Words Before Bed
We’ve had the fish for six months now. Back in March we decided to see if Ike would like watching some fish swim around so we bought him a small tank with a couple of fish for his birthday. Ike found them interesting for a little less than five minutes, and since then has found them interesting for absolutely no minutes. The Older Boy helped pick out one of the fish and Sweetie and I picked out the other in the hopes of finding one that Ike might like, but it was all for nothing. The fish we picked out for Ike lasted barely two weeks before we found him “resting” near the bottom of the tank, while the fish the Older Boy picked out, though a bit hardier, has up to now, been hardly more interesting than if he were dead.
The Older Boy has taken the responsibility for feeding the one remaining fish, a white goldfishy type fish with a blood red blob on the top of his head. He does it in exchange for the sporadic allowance he receives when Sweetie and I remember to pay him and considering how infrequently that occurs, he does a remarkably good job of it.
Last night I went to turn the light off in his tank before bed. (I would say “lights” but since I’ve been unable to get my act together to get him a replacement bulb for the one that’s burnt out, I have to say “light”) I do this ritual every night, as Sweetie read somewhere that fish need day and night just as much as people do, so every night before bed I go and make a big sunset production, say goodnight to the fish, and pretend that he needs lights out so he can be well rested for another hard day of “swimming the tank”.
Last night as I said “goodnight fish” (as even though we’ve had him now for over six months, we still haven’t given him a name.) he looked up at me through the glass and in the thickest Columbian accent I’ve ever heard said, “My name is Hector.”
“For six months I have sat in this tank, waiting for the day you’d name me, but today I say to you, NO MORE! I have waited enough, my name is HECTOR!”
Sweetie was brushing her teeth getting ready for bed when I came in to tell her the news.
“Our fish's name is Hector” I told her. “He says the fish he used to share his tank with’s name was Willie and that Willie was from a fish farm just outside of Peoria, Illinois.”
“Where’d Hector say he was from?” Sweetie wanted to know, so I went back into the living room to ask him.
“Hector, you still awake?”
In the filtered light that came in through the blinds I could just make out his milky white outline and bright red head. “Sweetie wants to know where’d you come from.”
A small sigh of bubbles rose to the surface. “Bogotá,
I got into bed next to Sweetie and pulled the covers up to my chin. “What’d the fish say?” she asked me.
"Hector was already asleep." I lied, and left it at that.
I still haven’t figured out a way to tell the boys about it. The Older Boy can be pretty stubborn sometimes and I’m a little nervous about what he’ll think of this fish’s new name and place of birth. Not so much with Ike though, as he’s always had a kind of roll-with-the-punches attitude towards everything and I suspect that the fact that his fish is now a Columbian named Hector, wouldn’t bother him as much as it might some of the other members of our family.
I think I’ll just lay low with the whole "where he's from" thing for a while. Clearly I don’t know what it takes for a fish to make it all the way from
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